Abstract

Since the 1960s, SMI has quietly executed a series of brilliantly negotiated takeovers throughout Europe, often acquiring companies much larger than itself. Despite formidable obstacles, SMI has managed to acquire state-owned competitors in Italy and France, as well as a tightly held semi-finished copper producer--one of Europe's largest--in "fortress" Germany, a country notoriously hostile to takeover bids from foreign firms. In an interview with the chairman of SMI's copper operations at the company's Florence headquarters, Prof. J.K. Sebenius of the Harvard Business School explores the negotiating strategies that have enabled what was once a little-known firm in Italy to consolidate a fragmented industry and become one of Europe's leading producers of semi-finished copper.

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Complex, multiparty negotiations are often analyzed as principals negotiating through agents, as two-level games (Putnam 1988), or in coalitional terms. The relatively new concept of a "multi-front negotiation campaign" (Sebenius 2010, Lax and Sebenius, 2012) offers an analytic approach that may enjoy descriptive and prescriptive advantages over more traditional approaches that focus on a specific negotiation as the unit of analysis. The efforts of Singapore Ambassador-At-Large Tommy Koh to negotiate the United States-Singapore Free Trade agreement serve as an extended case study of a complex, multiparty negotiation that illustrates and further elaborates the concept of a negotiation campaign.

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